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Register a new userRe-Translation Strategies For Long Form, Simultaneous, Spoken Language Translation
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Added by
Naveen Arivazhagan
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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We investigate the problem of simultaneous machine translation of long-form speech content. We target a continuous speech-to-text scenario, generating translated captions for a live audio feed, such as a lecture or play-by-play commentary. As this scenario allows for revisions to our incremental translations, we adopt a re-translation approach to simultaneous translation, where the source is repeatedly translated from scratch as it grows. This approach naturally exhibits very low latency and high final quality, but at the cost of incremental instability as the output is continuously refined. We experiment with a pipeline of industry-grade speech recognition and translation tools, augmented with simple inference heuristics to improve stability. We use TED Talks as a source of multilingual test data, developing our techniques on English-to-German spoken language translation. Our minimalist approach to simultaneous translation allows us to easily scale our final evaluation to six more target languages, dramatically improving incremental stability for all of them.
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Spoken language translation (SLT) is becoming more important in the increasingly globalized world, both from a social and economic point of view. It is one of the major challenges for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT), driving intense research activities in these areas. While past research in SLT, due to technology limitations, dealt mostly with speech recorded under controlled conditions, todays major challenge is the translation of spoken language as it can be found in real life. Considered application scenarios range from portable translators for tourists, lectures and presentations translation, to broadcast news and shows with live captioning. We would like to present PJIITs experiences in the SLT gained from the Eu-Bridge 7th framework project and the U-Star consortium activities for the Polish/English language pair. Presented research concentrates on ASR adaptation for Polish (state-of-the-art acoustic models: DBN-BLSTM training, Kaldi: LDA+MLLT+SAT+MMI), language modeling for ASR & MT (text normalization, RNN-based LMs, n-gram model domain interpolation) and statistical translation techniques (hierarchical models, factored translation models, automatic casing and punctuation, comparable and bilingual corpora preparation). While results for the well-defined domains (phrases for travelers, parliament speeches, medical documentation, movie subtitling) are very encouraging, less defined domains (presentation, lectures) still form a challenge. Our progress in the IWSLT TED task (MT only) will be presented, as well as current progress in the Polish ASR.
There has been great progress in improving streaming machine translation, a simultaneous paradigm where the system appends to a growing hypothesis as more source content becomes available. We study a related problem in which revisions to the hypothesis beyond strictly appending words are permitted. This is suitable for applications such as live captioning an audio feed. In this setting, we compare custom streaming approaches to re-translation, a straightforward strategy where each new source token triggers a distinct translation from scratch. We find re-translation to be as good or better than state-of-the-art streaming systems, even when operating under constraints that allow very few revisions. We attribute much of this success to a previously proposed data-augmentation technique that adds prefix-pairs to the training data, which alongside wait-k inference forms a strong baseline for streaming translation. We also highlight re-translations ability to wrap arbitrarily powerful MT systems with an experiment showing large improvements from an upgrade to its base model.
In this paper, we address the task of spoken language understanding. We present a method for translating spoken sentences from one language into spoken sentences in another language. Given spectrogram-spectrogram pairs, our model can be trained completely from scratch to translate unseen sentences. Our method consists of a pyramidal-bidirectional recurrent network combined with a convolutional network to output sentence-level spectrograms in the target language. Empirically, our model achieves competitive performance with state-of-the-art methods on multiple languages and can generalize to unseen speakers.
For spoken language translation (SLT) in live scenarios such as conferences, lectures and meetings, it is desirable to show the translation to the user as quickly as possible, avoiding an annoying lag between speaker and translated captions. In other words, we would like low-latency, online SLT. If we assume a pipeline of automatic speech recognition (ASR) and machine translation (MT) then a viable approach to online SLT is to pair an online ASR system, with a a retranslation strategy, where the MT system re-translates every update received from ASR. However this can result in annoying flicker as the MT system updates its translation. A possible solution is to add a fixed delay, or mask to the the output of the MT system, but a fixed global mask introduces undesirable latency to the output. We show how this mask can be set dynamically, improving the latency-flicker trade-off without sacrificing translation quality.
The University of Sheffield (USFD) participated in the International Workshop for Spoken Language Translation (IWSLT) in 2014. In this paper, we will introduce the USFD SLT system for IWSLT. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is achieved by two multi-pass deep neural network systems with adaptation and rescoring techniques. Machine translation (MT) is achieved by a phrase-based system. The USFD primary system incorporates state-of-the-art ASR and MT techniques and gives a BLEU score of 23.45 and 14.75 on the English-to-French and English-to-German speech-to-text translation task with the IWSLT 2014 data. The USFD contrastive systems explore the integration of ASR and MT by using a quality estimation system to rescore the ASR outputs, optimising towards better translation. This gives a further 0.54 and 0.26 BLEU improvement respectively on the IWSLT 2012 and 2014 evaluation data.
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